Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925 and grew up there. After graduating from the University of Miami, where he had studied musical composition with Carl Ruggles, he attended the University of North Carolina, Stanford and Iowa. His first book, The Summer Anniversaries, was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1959. It was followed by Night Light (1967), Departures (1973) and Selected Poems (1979) which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He also edited The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (1960). He taught at the universities of Syracuse, Florida and Iowa and after retirement lived in Iowa City, where he died in 2004.